1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic documents intended for transmission to recipients, such as email documents produced and transmitted by electronic mail services. The invention also relates to the creation, extraction, presentation and other actions related to meta-content for such documents.
2. Description of Related Art
The present format typical email documents is analogous to that of the isolated page of text before the advent of hypertext linking. With the exception of sender-specified attachments and in-line universal resource locators (URL's), email documents are, for the most part, static text. Semantic foci within the text of email documents are often difficult to identify for use by recipients.
Meta-content has been used for analyzing electronic documents in a variety of settings. Such meta-content may be descriptive matter, extrapolation, summary and/or interpolation of content that enables one to use or understand that content more easily, or in a new or more useful way. Meta-content need not be directly derived from the related contents but may have a more general relationship thereto. For example, storage of content, age of content, history of access to content, opinions about content, ratings of the content or many more types of information can be coded and associated with electronic documents as meta-content.
Typically meta-content extraction from documents has been done by the person desiring to analyze the documents, or organize documents he or she receives. Thus, to effectively use meta-content extraction techniques, each person receiving a document is required to have tools like “Thing Finder SDK” software provided by Inxight Software, Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).
It is desirable therefore to apply meta-content extraction and organization techniques to electronic documents, like email documents, in a manner that simplifies the use and management of such electronic documents for recipients.